The will to try, the simple decision to make the effort, is all that is needed in order to grasp what an infinite fund of amusement and delight lies stored away in books. No unusual imaginative powers are requisite to get us on horseback with Dumas's swashbuckling, duelling musketeers, or to place us beside Poe's heroes in their dread predicaments. What friend or acquaintance can tell you half the tales of hair-breadth escape, side-splitting dilemma, or tender romance, such as scores of the cleverest writers have spent their lives in devising? These same writers have left this world, they can never more be seen or heard on earth; but the very essence of their talent and their personality, their brightest, most sparkling thoughts and ideas remain, and may readily be placed within reach of your own hand. Charles Dickens can never again voyage over the Atlantic and stroll across Boston Common in velvet coat and plaid waistcoat, gesticulating with eyes a-twinkle. But his Mr. Pickwick's adventure with the Middle-Aged Lady in Yellow Curl-Papers still remains, and the echo of Pickwick's "Bless my soul, what a dreadful thing" will ring in our ears forever, and forever stir a quiet chuckle. Rudyard Kipling is growing old, and his pen no longer flourishes with the reckless vivacity of the days when he was little more than a "cub" reporter and wrote "Mandalay." Yet that same "Mandalay" of the "old Moulmein pagoda" and the "tinkly temple bells" will rouse a thrill of romance and adventure in thousands of hearts that are still to be born. Poor Stevenson coughed his life away at Samoa, after a plucky fight for life that led him to France, 'Frisco, and the South Seas. None the less, though he has gone from us, the pictures of hope and courage that leap and laugh at us from his pages are as vivid to-day as when they first brought their new joy to the delighted world. Read once more that dainty sketch--that etching rather--"A Night among the Pines," and see for yourself how that great master of words has voiced our modern appreciation of the great outdoors. For each great author is an individual, no two of them are alike, any more than you are like your next-door neighbor. Their modes of expression, their joy in life are as varied and divergent as life itself. There is, moreover, nothing commonplace about them, their work is strong and fresh. Each has his tale to tell, his song to sing, his meditations to entrust to us, his own special message to the spirit or to the intellect of many a generation and many a race.